Cheating
After reading Warren's post below I started thinking about the topic of cheating and, more specifically, I came to the realization that people that cheat here at Boalt don't bother me in the least.
At the start let me say that I have cheated, the last time being in 8th grade Algebra class and I got a C on the final—shows you how good I am at it. In high school, however, I would get really upset when I knew people were cheating. Usually I'd still get a better grade than them, but it still pissed me off. To some extent I always thought they were cheating themselves, after all at some point you'd have to learn the material.
In college I was a physics major, which meant that I was in class with the 4 other physics majors and exams were usually open books, notes, people, and anything else you could think of (it still didn't help me get better than a 31% on my Quantum final). When I was told about cheating in other classes I just thought to myself "those people are going to fail in the real world."
But you know what, that's not true! Nothing has made me realize the true nature of cheating and cheaters better than law school. Cheating isn't wrong because you're getting a better grade for less work (I can point to a lot of people in law school who get better grades on less work than I because they're smarter than me). Cheating is unethical plain and simple. But what one person's unethical is another person's edge—drugs, including caffeine, are a perfect example. There probably isn't a profession on the planet (except for maybe politician—and they're all former lawyers anyway) that lends itself to unethical behavior more than being a lawyer. What I mean to say is that if you want to cheat/act unethically to get ahead in the law you can, and chances are everyone (around you) is doing it also. Which is why it doesn't bother me that law school students would cheat. If you're going to be unethical you might as well practice before you get out and have to earn a living.
That's not to say that I excuse the behavior—I don't. It would be such a better world if people all had the same concept of what constituted ethical behavior (and of course by the same concept, I mean mine). But, I have simply realized that I'm not going to be the type of lawyer who would be unethical in practice, yet I know they're out there and I might as well get used to them while I'm in law school.
At the start let me say that I have cheated, the last time being in 8th grade Algebra class and I got a C on the final—shows you how good I am at it. In high school, however, I would get really upset when I knew people were cheating. Usually I'd still get a better grade than them, but it still pissed me off. To some extent I always thought they were cheating themselves, after all at some point you'd have to learn the material.
In college I was a physics major, which meant that I was in class with the 4 other physics majors and exams were usually open books, notes, people, and anything else you could think of (it still didn't help me get better than a 31% on my Quantum final). When I was told about cheating in other classes I just thought to myself "those people are going to fail in the real world."
But you know what, that's not true! Nothing has made me realize the true nature of cheating and cheaters better than law school. Cheating isn't wrong because you're getting a better grade for less work (I can point to a lot of people in law school who get better grades on less work than I because they're smarter than me). Cheating is unethical plain and simple. But what one person's unethical is another person's edge—drugs, including caffeine, are a perfect example. There probably isn't a profession on the planet (except for maybe politician—and they're all former lawyers anyway) that lends itself to unethical behavior more than being a lawyer. What I mean to say is that if you want to cheat/act unethically to get ahead in the law you can, and chances are everyone (around you) is doing it also. Which is why it doesn't bother me that law school students would cheat. If you're going to be unethical you might as well practice before you get out and have to earn a living.
That's not to say that I excuse the behavior—I don't. It would be such a better world if people all had the same concept of what constituted ethical behavior (and of course by the same concept, I mean mine). But, I have simply realized that I'm not going to be the type of lawyer who would be unethical in practice, yet I know they're out there and I might as well get used to them while I'm in law school.
Labels: Law School
posted by Disco Stu at 11:03 PM
2 Comments:
Warren, you're catching on. All good points. Alas, there are things you can do with a JD where you can't rely on unethical behavior, clerking and working in academia being among them. And yes, I would get upset if a cheater with manufactured grades took my honest clerkship away from me. However, this doesn't mean that I'd stoop to cheating.
The old saying goes if you can affect the outcome of an event-why worry. If you can't-why worry. I'm not going to cheat to get ahead. I'm not going to turn in cheaters. And I refuse to make myself angry by getting angry at others: There's nothing I can do to stop cheating, so I'm not going to worry about it. I simply rely on EW's statement that the world is too big and let whatever is supposed to happen happen.
Shmo you've made some excellent points. Obviously you have more experience with this than I do. My post simply approached the problem from a general point of view in that I've heard the stories and know that, most likely, some people decided to spend more than the 5.5 hours our prof limited us to on the contracts final. No use worrying about those individuals because I don't know who they are. A fellow contracts classmate put it best when asked if people really stuck to the time limit: You'd like to think so.
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